Heaven Is Vin Scully Narrating a No-Hitter

Clayton Kershaw threw a no-hitter last night and Vin Scully knew in the 5th inning. I don't know how, but he did.

He's seen 19 of them before and three perfect games, and called them all on the radio or on TV for the Dodgers, so he had some idea of what these things look like. But this was some real oracle stuff, right from the beginning. And when he knew it was coming, like one of those writers who thought it to be a vocation, like a Hemingway or a Fitzgerald, he started writing literature about it out loud.

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He called Hanley Ramirez's error "the only blot on the escutcheon of Clayton Kershaw." When Kershaw finished it off, he regaled how "when it's all said in done, he will talk about a dream come true with his wife, Ellen."

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And at the end of the fourth, after the Dodgers rallied and increased their lead to eight, he said this:

"We can put it out on the table: With a runaway game, it is Clayton Kershaw now who becomes a major story; retired 12 in a row."

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If you told me, "Nobody can see the future, but Vin Scully can," I would believe you. It would be stupid of me not to.

The guy is the last of a great thing, unless we can learn from him right now. He's making art on the television, immediately. He's elevating the thing you're seeing to a higher plane just by listening to him.

In a time when everybody has an opinion and nobody wants to hear it, it is Vin Scully's job to talk and he rarely does. But when he does, everybody listens.

He has seen the soullessness of instant reaction, of the huffing, tantrumed media we've created and have accidentally endorsed and may be stuck in for too long or ever. He has viewed it from afar, and he has embraced the void.

Just in case Kershaw let through an infield single at some point, Scully spun a yarn in the sixth about Rockies reliever Chris Martin, about how his arm had given out early on in life and how he was moving boxes for a shipping company in his 20s until a miracle happened and his arm worked again without pain or explanation. Pardon how boring I made that story sound. Vin Scully, as always, made it sound like a Pixar movie, an impossibility and a little bit of a miracle, and he did it while he talked around a walk, a balk and a couple of flyouts.

He has the stories to make even the boring stuff worthwhile. The stories are not about himself. They're about the guy who used to move boxes. He is the better version of us, when we finally see all of this information and use it to talk up and better each other and not just ourselves.

In between the eighth and the ninth, while Kershaw was nervously tossing warm-up pitches and Scully was talking through what would typically be a commercial break, he reminded everyone why he is here.

"Since we don't believe in superstition, our job is to give you information." #VinScully#kershaw